Grieving: Ruth's baby girl died shortly after birth but she believes her daughter was stolen and is alive

It has been two decades since Ruth Appleby lost her daughter, but she admits she has never recovered.

Since her baby died in a Spanish hospital within hours of being born, Ruth has thought daily about Rebecca, the child she never knew.

She marked her birthdays with cards and gifts, travelled to place flowers on Rebecca’s grave and, when she returned to live in her native Britain, had the infant’s remains cremated so they could be with her at her home in North Yorkshire.

Agonising as it must be to lose a longed-for baby, however, it is difficult to imagine a scenario more harrowing than the one now confronting Ruth thanks to a discovery, made last year, which casts a disturbing new light upon everything she thought she knew about her daughter’s death.

Ruth is convinced that Rebecca did not die at all, but instead fell victim to a scandal engulfing Spain, a criminal conspiracy that, with its roots deep in the era of General Franco, has seen an estimated 300,000 babies trafficked by a network of doctors, nurses, priests and nuns.

She has come to the horrific conclusion that her daughter was stolen from her by medical staff and sold for adoption.

It is an extraordinary claim, but in the context of the details emerging from Spain, an all-too convincing one.

Police in Britain and Madrid are investigating and Foreign Secretary William Hague is supporting her case.

Meanwhile, Ruth, a 49-year-old teaching assistant who lives near Richmond, is left struggling to accept the realisation that Rebecca could have been living with another family all this time.

‘I’ve spent 20 years grieving for my baby, but now I no longer have any idea what I’m dealing with,’ she says.

‘Living with the unknown is so incredibly difficult. Knowing she could be out there somewhere is an amazing feeling, but she’s been brought up as somebody else’s child. I have to live with the fact I may never find out what happened to her.’

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More than 1,000 Spanish families have gone to court to seek the truth about their lost children, there are demands for a national inquiry and last year the first formal charges were filed against a nun, Sister Maria Gomez Valbuena – but she recently died aged 87.

Ruth, the first foreigner to become involved in the scandal, knows discovering the truth will not be easy. The Spanish authorities give every impression of hoping that the scandal will simply vanish; 70 per cent of claims such as hers have been automatically closed by the courts.

Ruth had lived in Spain for a decade with her former husband Howard when she gave birth to Rebecca. Howard, a fellow Briton, worked in publishing and the couple had settled in the northern city of La Coruna.

Crushed happiness: Ruth with her ex-husband Howard, Rebecca's father, when the pair were living in Spain in the early 90s

They were delighted by her pregnancy, but two weeks after her due date, she had not yet given birth and was admitted to Hospital Materno Infantil Teresa Herrera where, almost immediately, a number of odd and suspicious situations arose.

Unusually, it was not until two days later, on December 2, 1992, that she was induced. The previous day, she had an unsettling experience.

She says: ‘I was sharing a room with two other pregnant women, one of whom was supposed to be taking total bed-rest. A nurse told her off for getting up, saying: “If you don’t rest, your baby could die like this woman’s baby is going to,” pointing at me.

‘I can only assume that she thought I couldn’t speak Spanish. I was upset, but I dismissed it as the nurse being strange, possibly because I was a foreigner.’

At 8pm, she says, two nurses gave her an injection, which they explained was morphine, a drug that can be harmful to an unborn child.

‘I now think they were trying to delay giving me a caesarean until the middle of the night, when the hospital was quietest,’ she says.

The baby was eventually born with Ruth under general anaesthetic at 1.20am. Howard went to see the infant in the creche.

‘She looked fine; perfect. He was elated,’ Ruth says.

At 4.30am Howard received a call
telling him to return to the hospital. When he arrived, he was informed
his daughter had died from heart problems, and was told it was not
possible for him to see her because the post-mortem had already been
carried out.

When Ruth came
round at 7.30am, she says she was told baby was doing well. However,
Howard arrived at her bedside and broke the news that Rebecca was dead.

‘I
was in shock. I couldn’t stop crying. A doctor visited me and told me
it was very rare for this to happen, like “winning a bad lottery”, which
I thought was incredibly insensitive. I couldn’t understand it, but I
had no reason not to trust the doctors.’

Stolen: An estimated 300,000 babies trafficked by a criminal network, such as this baby boy in the arms of his new mother surrounded by the nuns who sold him in Malaga in 1971

After they had returned home, the hospital informed them they had buried Rebecca in a local cemetery. When Ruth returned to the hospital for a check-up six weeks after Rebecca’s birth, she found the staff cold in their attitude towards her.

‘I started crying when a doctor asked me how my baby was – she had my case notes so I was stunned she didn’t know she’d died. The midwife, who had been lovely previously, accused me of being hysterical and told me to go home and take some tranquillisers.’

Ruth suffered from depression for many months and did not feel ready to try for another baby for a long time. Eventually, in 1995, she gave birth to Rosie, followed by Benjy, in 2001. Howard and Ruth split up, although they remain on good terms, and Ruth and the children moved back to Britain in 2006.

In 2010, she decided to have Rebecca’s remains cremated and brought back to Britain. It was this decision, and the morbidly ham-fisted execution of it, that first led her to re-evaluate the circumstances surrounding Rebecca’s birth and death.

She flew out to La Coruna and, with a
Spanish lawyer, witnessed the baby’s coffin being exhumed. A crematorium
had provided a box in which to put the coffin, but it proved too large
to fit. The cemetery workers took a crowbar and opened the coffin to
transfer the remains into the box. Ruth tried not to look, but could not
avoid seeing the contents.

‘I was so shocked and horrified that I was
fighting not to faint, but the image I saw is engraved clearly on my
mind. It was a skeleton, which surprised me, because the crematorium had
warned me there might be nothing left. Rebecca had weighed only around
6lb, and the bones of newborns tend not to survive long.

‘It
was also much bigger than I was expecting – more like the skeleton of a
toddler. I was so traumatised by the sight that I went ahead with the
cremation. Now, I regret it deeply.’

Then,
after five decades of suppression, the Spanish baby scandal surfaced,
and Ruth was left with no choice but to confront the highly suspicious
circumstances of Rebecca’s loss. Last February, she was visited by a
Spanish friend, who told her she had come to Britain specifically to
tell her about the scandal.

‘She said she hadn’t been able to get me
out of her mind since she’d first heard about the stolen babies,’ says
Ruth. ‘It made sense. I knew deep down that what I saw wasn’t the body
of my baby. When I spoke to my ex-husband, who was still in Spain, he
admitted he’d been trying to find the right time to talk to me about the
scandal, too.’

Scandal: A woman holds a banner reading 'I look for my daughter born 23 August 1982 at Sanjurjo Hospital, Valencia' at a demonstration demanding judges re-open the stolen baby cases in Madrid last month

Other cases at the same hospital are under investigation, Ruth learned; and so she became convinced the body in the coffin was not her daughter.

While most other parents were told they could not see their ‘dead’ baby, or that the child had already been cremated, DNA evidence shows that fake burials were indeed used in numerous cases, with some graves containing bones belonging to animals.

Ruth says: ‘I’ve been totally traumatised, not least because I have the ashes of someone else’s child in my house.

Coming to terms with the possibility that there was nothing wrong with my baby, and that she was stolen from me, has been impossible. Losing my baby changed me for ever; I never stopped grieving. It was an unimaginable act of evil to put all those families through that.’

The theft of newborns began under General Franco’s regime as a system for taking children away from families deemed politically dangerous. They were then handed to childless couples whose beliefs and financial security meant they were seen as more appropriate parents.

After the dictator’s death in 1975, it continued, as the Catholic Church retained a powerful influence on public life. Doctors and nurses across the country – many of the latter nuns – took thousands of babies. They were motivated, it appears, in part by disapproval of the rightful parents, but they also received an average of £5,000 from prospective adopters. Most of the families believed the children were unwanted and the adoptions were legitimate.

Remarkably, cases have been reported as recently as the late Nineties.

Several parents have been reunited with their children. They include a 79-year-old woman named Manuela Polo, who last year met her daughter, Maria, 44 years after she had been told her baby had died in a hospital in La Coruna.

Ruth reported her suspicions to her local police in North Yorkshire, who passed the case to Scotland Yard. It was then transferred to Interpol in Madrid last September. In November, she received a report from Interpol stating that she has no case. She says the report was based on documentation provided by the hospital, which she says contains a welter of serious inaccuracies, including the time of death.

The effect has been devastating for Ruth, who has resorted to counselling and antidepressants. Undeterred, however, she is now preparing an appeal. William Hague, her constituency MP, receives updates from the police and has asked the British Embassy in Madrid to raise her case with the Spanish Ministry of Justice.

‘He has been extremely supportive and has promised to do everything in his power to help me,’ Ruth says.

She finds it unlikely, given the number of expat Britons in Spain, that she is the lone British woman among the possible 300,000 mothers who had their babies stolen.

‘I hope I am alone, because I wouldn’t want anybody else to experience this, but if there’s a possibility of me helping someone, I’d love to,’ she says.

Ruth admits she has begun searching for her daughter through online support networks. Two girls contacted her, but their details did not tally with her own.

‘When I realised they weren’t my daughter, I cried my heart out,’ she says. ‘I’m trying, for the sake of my two children, not to let this consume me, but I owe it to the baby I lost never to stop doing whatever I can to find her.’